1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to searching, displaying and navigating of data objects within data management systems.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Searching data is known and primarily limited to unstructured data including web pages, email and documents. Traditional search engines such as Google search are used to search documents and pages for specific key strings. When a document or web page contains a particular string, it is returned as part of search results.
Many forms of valuable data are stored as structured data in data management systems, such as relational database management systems. In particular, relational database management systems include data stored in tables, where database records are ordered in rows of the tables. Database schemas are provided by the database management systems to describe the organization of data and information within the databases. For example, in relational database management systems, database schemas are provided to describe the organization of data and information in tables, columns and fields within tables, indexes for the tables as well as relationships between the tables, columns and indexes.
Some search engines are capable of searching relational database management systems. Such search engines typically treat each row of data obtained from the search as a complete search object and return the entire row in the search results. This requires the searcher to have to relate each row with the rest of the data in the database to obtain usable results from the search query.